A new research study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will utilize Daynamica’s pioneering mobile sensing technologies to better understand the often overlooked “time toxicity” experienced by cancer patients.
The study, titled “Time Toxicity of Cancer: The Time Demands of Cancer-Related Activities and Their Impact on Well-Being and Quality of Life” (1R01CA277714-01), was recently awarded a grant from the NIH. It will be led by researchers at the University of Minnesota.
As cancer treatments become more complex, they impose growing demands on patients’ time and energy devoted to healthcare activities. This “time toxicity” forces many patients to neglect other important life activities and relationships, negatively impacting their well-being and quality of life.
However, “time toxicity” remains an underexplored aspect of cancer care with no standardized ways to measure the time burdens patients face.
This is where Daynamica’s smartphone app will play a vital role. The app will be used to automatically track the time patients spend on daily cancer-related activities like treatments, appointments, and managing their care logistics.
Over a 28-day period, the study will follow 80 individuals with advanced ovarian cancer or metastatic breast cancer. In addition to the automated Daynamica app data, participants will provide details on specific activities, well-being assessments, and quality of life surveys.
By combining objective sensor data from Daynamica with patients’ own self-reported experiences, the researchers aim to accurately capture the full extent of cancer’s time demands. This multi-dimensional view is critical for developing future interventions to reduce these unrecognized toxicities.
The researchers will analyze associations between time spent on cancer care and daily well-being, explore how these impacts vary across patients, and create a first-of-its-kind scoring system to quantify an individual’s overall “time toxicity” burden.
The investigators aim to leverage their findings to develop and test interventions, like optimizing treatment schedules and locations, to help minimize the “time toxicity” imposed by cancer care.
As a pioneer of mobile sensing for understanding human activity patterns, Daynamica’s platform will provide unprecedented insights into the true lived experiences of cancer patients in this high-impact research study illuminating an overlooked issue.